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I am old before my time because the pitch seems to be "you don't have to write that boilerplate code to consume one API and output to another" and my response is "but I enjoy writing that code and also paying my rent???"

That said, for small bits of assistance or getting a task started, I found AI was a useful little tool. Developers do a lot of copy-pasting code from online, and a language model is well suited to doing a more flexible version of that, mapping human language inputs to code outputs.

BUT, in my own work I've refused to pay for any of these tools. The tech can be genuinely useful, but it seems completely insane to me to outsource coding itself to a cloud service with a subscription. It's bad enough we did this with CI/CD but now we're even renting the ability to write code?!

As a non-coder, whenever I see coders talking about "oh it's really helpful to help me search a library and pull exactly what function I need" I'm baffled by the fact that these code libraries were apparently not well organized/not easily searchable to begin with??? Baffles my librarian mind

They're often quite well organized actually. Before LLMs, editor software had already built robust auto completion functionality using computer-readable documentation. What's harder to find is a code sample showing how to combine various functionality to match your precise use case.